Impression, Sunrise, in one sitting

You are Claude Monet. You grew up in Le Havre from about the age of five, in a family that lived off the port, and as a teenager you sold caricatures. Around 1856 the painter Eugène Boudin turned you toward painting outdoors.

In Paris you studied at the Académie Suisse, where you met Pissarro, served in the army in Algeria, and then in 1862 met Johan Jongkind back at Le Havre before joining Charles Gleyre's studio with Bazille, Renoir and Sisley. Long after, you credited Jongkind with the definitive education of your eye.

During the war of 1870–71 you were in London, where you saw Turner and Constable and met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. From late 1871 you lived at Argenteuil, and in 1872 your pictures began to sell.

From the same window you paint three views: a dawn view now at the Getty, this one, and a night view now at the Museum Barberini. Le Havre is France's most modern port, rebuilding after the war, and you show it at work.

You distinguish quick impressions from finished pictures. At the 1874 exhibition you will also show a detailed harbour view, Fishing Boats Leaving the Port of Le Havre, beside this one.

An impression

Not a view of Le Havre you could navigate by, but the sun in mist with masts below, caught quickly.

One sitting

Thin paint in a narrow range of hues, worked wet into wet so it can be finished in a few hours.

The title

When the catalogue asks for one, you will say to put “Impression”. You told that story in 1897.

You work indoors, at a window looking south-east over the outer harbour at dawn. The museum names the Hôtel de l'Amirauté on the Grand Quai, which was later destroyed in the war; you did stay there in 1874, but no document places your room in 1872.

For the 2014 exhibition, the astronomer Donald Olson worked out the moment. The sun stands two or three degrees high, about 20 to 30 minutes after sunrise. Ships moved only near high tide, and the smoke shows an east wind. Six dates fit; the curators chose 13 November 1872, at about 7:35 in the morning. Le Havre's records for that morning give a light east wind, fog and a choppy sea.

Treat the minute as a best guess, not a fact. It is the most probable of six dates, it assumes you painted exactly what you saw, and at least one reviewer called the method rigid scientism.

• Left: the Quai au Bois, with masts and the tall chimney of an engine house built in 1872.
• Right: the Quai Courbe under construction, with cranes and a building.
• Centre: a gap marking the lock into the docks.
• Foreground: the ferrymen's boats.

You sign it at lower left, “Claude Monet”. The “72” beside the name was added later.

In April 1874 it hangs in the exhibition your group organises on the boulevard des Capucines, open from 15 April to 15 May. The catalogue lists it as number 98, Impression, soleil levant. About 3,500 visitors come, and critics prefer other pictures.

On 25 April Louis Leroy mocks the show in Le Charivari under the title “L'Exposition des impressionnistes”: his fictional academic painter finds that embryonic wallpaper is more finished than this seascape. Four days later Jules-Antoine Castagnary uses “impressionists” approvingly. Leroy did not invent the word; it was already studio slang, and you chose it.

In May 1874 you sell the painting to Ernest Hoschedé for 800 francs.

• In 1878 it was sold as a sunset, and in 1879 shown as a fog effect. The title we use was fixed only in 1965.
• It spent the Second World War in a crate at the château of Chambord.
• It was stolen in an armed daytime robbery at the Musée Marmottan on 27 October 1985, recovered in Corsica in December 1990, and rehung, undamaged, in April 1991.
• After its recovery, a yellowed varnish was removed. No conservation report has been published.

One thing has not changed: the trick of the sun. The neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone pointed out that it has almost exactly the same luminance as the sky around it. The parts of your visual system that see brightness and depth can hardly find it, while the parts that see colour can, so it seems to shimmer. In the reproduction used here, the sun's average brightness is within about 3% of the sky around it. In greyscale it nearly vanishes.